Consumer AI in Everyday Life: From Novelty to Necessity

By: Amy Li, Sharon Pan, and ChenLi Wang

The story of consumer generative AI from 2022 to 2025 has been one of widespread experimentation, viral moments, and increasingly meaningful integration into daily life.

The initial boom saw dramatic adoption spikes with varying retention—ChatGPT emerged as the category leader with 400M monthly active users while early "magic avatar" apps fizzled after their viral peaks. 

To understand where this market is heading, we combed through web and app traffic data of top consumer AI apps. What we found is exciting: we're now witnessing the emergence of AI products that people return to regularly as part of their daily routines.

In the next few years, we expect breakthrough products that seamlessly blend into how we work, create, and connect. It's remarkable to think about, but we are witnessing the formation of entirely new digital habits that will fundamentally reshape our relationship with technology.

A short history of the consumer AI landscape

Early experimentation (2022–early 2023)

The early wave of consumer AI was driven largely by novelty and virality. Propelled by social media trends, image generation apps led the charge, with Lensa, Remini, and Wombo capturing attention through viral avatar creators and art generation. At the same time, early AI chatbots like Replika gained attention by offering companionship, while practical GPT-3-based tools provided useful answers for specific tasks.

Market expansion and the first signs of habit (2023)

The arrival of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 marked a significant turning point in consumer AI adoption. By mid-2023, general-purpose AI assistants dominated consumer AI, capturing the majority of traffic across leading AI platforms.

In parallel, two notable trends were taking shape:

1. AI companions: Apps like Character AI experienced remarkable traction – users spent 1.5+ hours daily on the platform – highlighting strong demand for social AI experiences.
2. Creative tools: Platforms like Midjourney and Suno delivered new formats of creative experiences, expanding beyond just images into text, video, and audio creation.

A more defined market (2024 - early 2025)

By 2024–early 2025, consumer AI transitioned from a wild experimental phase into a more clearly defined (yet still dynamic) market with some solidified segments, major players, and evidence of sustained usage and revenue.

The evolution is due to a few converging factors, including:

Maturing user base: As consumers moved beyond initial experimentation, their preferences and needs became increasingly refined. The market responded with more reliable, personalized, and intuitive products.

Advances in foundation models: AI models became dramatically more capable while costing less to run, solving the previous dilemma where sophisticated features were either too expensive to deploy at scale or not reliable enough for daily use.

As a result, AI-native consumer apps has broadly segmented into four major categories:

1. General-purpose chatbots and assistants (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek)
2. AI creative tools (e.g., Midjourney, Luma, Suno, Leonardo, AI Novelist)
3. AI companions & social chat (e.g., Character AI, Replika)
4. Specialized utility apps (e.g., Perplexity, Photomath, QuillBot)

Questions we're grappling with

What emerging consumer AI use cases are gaining the most organic traction? Which problems are consumers actively seeking AI solutions for?

Are there meaningful differences in behaviors in AI adoption and retention across demographics?

How will the consumer-AI relationship evolve beyond the utilitarian and novelty phase? Which behaviors are experimental vs habitual?

Are there use cases that AI is uniquely positioned to address, where AI could meaningfully change consumer behaviors in the future?

Five interesting things we observed

1. Categories of apps continue to evolve - vanity apps get an AI facelift

A new wave of AI-powered beauty and aesthetics apps picked up steam in the last 12 months, turning vanity into a service. Apps like Umax and LooksMax AI give users AI-generated ratings of attractiveness, and generate simulations of “a hotter you”. 

These platforms have shown remarkable growth – both LooksMax and Umax have sustained ~8M MAU since mid-2024 – and have established viable subscription models offering weekly “check-ups” on their looks. 

Perhaps most striking is the demographic shift: over 90% of LooksMax and Umax users are males aged 16 to 45—a significant departure from traditional beauty apps, which historically skewed heavily female. AI-wingman apps such as Rizz share a similar gender dynamic, helping 5M+ users be witty, flirty, and humorous - generating everything from better pickup lines to smooth transitions out of tricky conversations.

The ubiquity of Instagram, TikTok, and dating apps has made appearance-consciousness universal. AI apps allow private, personalized experimentation with one’s looks and vibe. The combination of these two factors, paired with a cultural rebranding of men’s grooming as self-improvement (78% of GenZ men use facial skincare products compared to 42% in 2022), has made it easier and more acceptable for men to engage with “vanity”. 

Although these apps still pale in comparison to long-standing, female-oriented apps like Meitu (22M MAU, 90% female), we are witnessing a new male-oriented segment emerging in the beauty & vanity app market.

2. Creative tools remain a top use case and are increasingly useful in new modalities

Creative tools have remained one of the most compelling use cases for consumer AI since the beginning of the generative AI wave. AI-powered content editing remains a top use case - the second-largest in mobile downloads after general assistants.

Image and video editing apps like Hypic, UpFoto, VivaCut, Filmora, and B612 have consistently ranked among the top AI applications globally.

What’s new is high-quality generative capabilities in video and music.

Breakthrough moments in new modalities

Suno saw a surge in unique monthly visitors from <1K in March 2024 to ~18M as of March 2025. Curiously, 70% of the traffic comes from mobile web browsers. 

The ability to create complete songs from simple prompts describing a mood or concept seems to have struck a chord with users. Meanwhile, Udio, another player in the generative music space, sees approximately 2M unique monthly web visitors, according to Semrush.

In parallel, after a year-long struggle to deliver consistent quality, AI video generation finally achieved reliable short-form output in the past six months. New entrants Hailuo AI (~8M) and Kling AI (~6M), which launched in mid-2024, have already surpassed OpenAI's Sora (~5M) in unique monthly visitors.

Why users are embracing AI creative tools

The consumer appetite for these tools stems from a fundamental internet reality: content is currency. AI video and audio tools help users generate engaging media content that might otherwise be beyond their technical abilities or time constraints.

While image generation and editing still dominate AI creative tool downloads, video and music capabilities are rapidly gaining ground. The speed of mainstream adoption has accelerated as output quality has finally crossed a critical usability threshold.

The road ahead

We're seeing barriers in content creation crumble across more and more form factors. This phenomenon has the potential to unlock entirely new creator demographics. As technological breakthroughs converge with enthusiastic user adoption, we anticipate the generation of multi-billions in new value in creativity and personal expression through Consumer AI.

3. ChatGPT increasingly gaining share, but AI assistant market remains diverse

Total adoption and usage of AI assistants has skyrocketed since early-2024. What we found interesting is the distribution of the total MAU across top players over time. ChatGPT remains the industry heavyweight by a significant margin, but the AI assistant market has seen strong challengers enter across both web and mobile in the past year.

Web-based challengers

DeepSeek made a dramatic entrance in early 2025. Within just 10 days of its January 2025 launch, DeepSeek's web chatbot accumulated enough traffic to rank #2 globally among AI web products for the month. Its success has been notably driven by geographical factors—28% of its Feb 2025 usage came from China (where ChatGPT is banned), with additional strong adoption in the U.S. (7%), India (6%), and Kenya (6%).

Mobile challengers

The mobile AI landscape has higher adoption diversity, although ChatGPT is gaining increasingly global share. Early 2023 saw an influx of ChatGPT clones flooding app stores (because ChatGPT had not yet launched their own mobile app), with some publishers like Codeway in Turkey launching multiple AI apps across different categories to capture market share. 

Luzia, originally built as an AI assistant integrated into WhatsApp and Telegram, has since launched a standalone app and has built significant traction with Spanish and Portuguese speakers (20M MAU). It’s a notable example of how regional focus and platform-specific strategies can drive substantial adoption.

New mobile challengers such as Cici and Doubao (both from ByteDance), as well as Grok, have quickly climbed the AI assistant ranks, with DeekSeek ranking 3rd, Doubao 4th, and Grok 11th in MAU as of March 2025.

Regional preferences, language support, specialized features, and innovative distribution strategies have created space for multiple successful players in what once seemed destined (based on web AI assistant product performance) to be a winner-take-all category.

4. Companion apps see exceptional engagement as loneliness plagues the world

One of the most intriguing consumer AI trends is the rise of AI companion apps – chatbots designed for mentorship, friendship, romance, and even therapy. While they don't match general AI assistants like ChatGPT in terms of usage (Character AI has ~10% of ChatGPT’s MAU), they significantly outperform in user engagement.

Exceptional engagement levels

The usage stats of AI companion platforms are off-the-charts, dwarfing engagement seen in other categories of AI-native apps. The average Character AI user has 25 sessions per day, spending about 1.5 hours daily in-app. Competitors like Talkie, Linky, and HiWaifu also see 1+ hours of daily usage per user. This exceptional engagement stems from the apps' ability to fulfill basic psychological needs—to be heard, to converse freely, and to receive non-judgmental attention—needs that have grown more acute as traditional social connections have weakened across societies.

Against the backdrop of a global loneliness epidemic

This trend emerges against the backdrop of loneliness as a growing public health crisis. The WHO estimates that 1 in 4 older adults and 1 in 10 adolescents are experiencing loneliness. The 2025 Pew Research Center survey highlights that one in six Americans feel lonely or isolated from those around them all or most of the time.

While these apps can provide comfort and a sense of belonging, there’s an ongoing debate about whether they alleviate loneliness or exacerbate it by replacing human contact. Either way, the AI companion boom is real: what was once a sci-fi concept of having a personal AI companion is now a daily reality for millions.

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5. There are distinct regional flavors to global GenAI adoption wave

While generative AI is a worldwide phenomenon, its adoption follows distinct regional patterns shaped by culture, language, pricing, and platform preferences. By 2025, a few interesting regional trends have emerged across the global landscape.

Latin America: WhatsApp as the gateway to AI

As the region's primary communication platform, WhatsApp has become the natural gateway to AI adoption in Latin America. This integration with existing messaging habits and interfaces creates a seamless adoption path. Startups like Luzia capitalized on this trend, initially launching as WhatsApp integrations before expanding to standalone applications. 

An innovation distinctive to this region is in conversational commerce, where AI is changing how local businesses operate. Small merchants across Latin America have long relied on WhatsApp as their primary sales and customer service channel. This has led to startups building AI conversational tools to help both corner shops and major brands engage with consumers on WhatsApp.

India: Large-scale, rapid adoption through mobile

India stands out as one of the largest consumer generative AI user bases globally, ranking as the second-highest country for ChatGPT usage by early 2023 (accounting for approximately 10% of global traffic, nearly matching the U.S.). More recently, a Salesforce study in 2025 found ~70% of Indians surveyed were using generative AI—the highest percentage of any country in the study. 

A few factors drove this exceptional level of adoption:

• English proficiency: India's large English-speaking population aligns perfectly with the capabilities of first-generation AI models.
• Mobile-first digital landscape: With 800M+ smartphone users who primarily access the internet through mobile devices, consumer AI tech (accessible via apps and mobile browsers) seamlessly integrates into daily digital routines
• Tech-savvy youth demographic: With more than 50% of its population under 30, India has a digitally fluent user base eager to adopt new technologies.

China: A tech-forward walled garden

China's approach to consumer generative AI is unique, developing almost entirely within an ecosystem of domestic platforms. Though ChatGPT initially created buzz among Chinese netizens in late 2022 (with tech-savvy users accessing it via VPNs and contributing ~3% of global ChatGPT traffic), the landscape quickly shifted to local alternatives.

WeChat has become a key distribution channel, with many AI providers rolling out mini-programs or integrations that allow users to interact with AIs directly inside the app without needing separate downloads. This reduced friction, and by late 2023, millions of Chinese users were routinely engaging with AI assistants embedded in everyday apps.

In the same in same vein of integration into existing apps, Alibaba's DingTalk generates meeting summaries and presentations, while Bilibili's AI helps creators produce content. Today, Chinese users routinely use these tools for practical tasks—drafting messages, creating stickers, and translating menus—making AI a seamless part of daily digital life.

Where we're headed

The shift from novelty to utility is accelerating: The most enduring consumer AI applications are those that solve genuine problems or fulfill basic human needs—whether creative expression, information access, or even companionship. We're particularly intrigued by products that embed themselves into daily habits rather than relying on occasional usage.

College campuses as leading indicators. Amid these broad consumer trends, we're paying particular attention to how GenAI is being adopted in academic environments. History suggests that what college students adopt early often foreshadows tech trends in the workplace—from search engines and cloud storage (e.g., Dropbox) to collaborative documents (e.g., Google Docs).

The great creative unlock. As AI tools make sophisticated content creation accessible across text, image, music, and video, we're witnessing something more profound than just easier creation. We're seeing entirely new creator classes emerge—people who previously lacked the technical skills to express themselves. This fundamental shift in who can create compelling content will likely reshape digital culture and alter how ideas spread globally.

We are excited about consumer AI and believe a tremendous amount of value will be created by AI-native consumer apps in the next few years. The winners won't just offer impressive technology - they'll build products that solve real problems and blend naturally into users’ lives.

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If you are building in the consumer AI space and have an eye for tasteful product experiences, we would love to hear from you! Please email Amy (amy@wndrco.com), Sharon (sharon@wndrco.com), and ChenLi (chenli@wndrco.com).